RHEL 5 : freeradius2 (RHSA-2013:0134)

high Nessus Plugin ID 63415

Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing a security update for freeradius2.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2013:0134 advisory.

FreeRADIUS is an open-source Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) server which allows RADIUS clients to perform authentication against the RADIUS server. The RADIUS server may optionally perform accounting of its operations using the RADIUS protocol.

It was found that the unix module ignored the password expiration setting in /etc/shadow. If FreeRADIUS was configured to use this module for user authentication, this flaw could allow users with an expired password to successfully authenticate, even though their access should have been denied. (CVE-2011-4966)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* After log rotation, the freeradius logrotate script failed to reload the radiusd daemon and log messages were lost. This update has added a command to the freeradius logrotate script to reload the radiusd daemon and the radiusd daemon re-initializes and reopens its log files after log rotation as expected. (BZ#787111)

* The radtest script with the eap-md5 option failed because it passed the IP family argument when invoking the radeapclient utility and the radeapclient utility did not recognize the IP family. The radeapclient utility now recognizes the IP family argument and radtest now works with eap-md5 as expected. (BZ#846476)

* Previously, freeradius was compiled without the --with-udpfromto option. Consequently, with a multihomed server and explicitly specifying the IP address, freeradius sent the reply with the wrong IP source address.
With this update, freeradius has been built with the --with-udpfromto configuration option and the RADIUS reply is always sourced from the IP address the request was sent to. (BZ#846471)

* Due to invalid syntax in the PostgreSQL admin schema file, the FreeRADIUS PostgreSQL tables failed to be created. With this update, the syntax has been adjusted and the tables are created as expected. (BZ#818885)

* FreeRADIUS has a thread pool that dynamically grows based on load. If multiple threads using the rlm_perl() function are spawned in quick succession, the FreeRADIUS server sometimes terminated unexpectedly with a segmentation fault due to parallel calls to the rlm_perl_clone() function. With this update, a mutex for the threads has been added and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#846475)

* The man page for rlm_dbm_parser was incorrectly installed as rlm_dbm_parse, omitting the trailing r. The man page now correctly appears as rlm_dbm_parser. (BZ#781877)

All users of freeradius2 are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. They are also advised to check for RPM backup files ending in .rpmnew or .rpmsave under the /etc/raddb/ directory after the update because the FreeRADIUS server will attempt to load every file it finds in its configuration directory. The extra files will often cause the wrong configuration values to be applied resulting in either unpredictable behavior or the failure of the server to initialize and run.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Update the RHEL freeradius2 package based on the guidance in RHSA-2013:0134.

See Also

http://www.nessus.org/u?c95dfba5

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013:0134

https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#low

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=781877

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=787111

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=818885

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=846471

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=846474

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=846475

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=846476

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=879045

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 63415

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2013-0134.nasl

Version: 1.23

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 1/8/2013

Updated: 11/4/2024

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Low

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6

Temporal Score: 4.4

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:P

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2011-4966

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 8.8

Temporal Score: 7.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2-ldap, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2-utils, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2-python, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2-perl, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2-mysql, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2-postgresql, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2-krb5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:freeradius2-unixodbc

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Patch Publication Date: 1/8/2013

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2011-4966

RHSA: 2013:0134